Grass Valley Realigns Global Organizations

September 15, 2006

Responding to a growing worldwide demand for its digital content creation and delivery solutions, Grass Valley is realigning product lines under four profit centers.

The Production and Post-Production, and Play-out and Editing Systems profit centers will address the market for content creation systems. Jan Eveleens will head the Production and Post-Production profit center, which is responsible for cameras, switchers, integrated production solutions, and solutions for digital intermediate and post production. Hiroshi Yamada, founder of the Canopus line of editing products that was acquired by Grass Valley in 2005, will head the Play-out and Editing profit center, which is responsible for servers and digital news production, as well as the desktop video editing and professional video solutions added to the Grass Valley product line from the Canopus acquisition.

Christophe Delahousse will lead the Video Networks Solutions profit center that will focus on MPEG-4 HD compression and video network signal management requirements for head-end environments, as well as solutions for emerging mobile and IP-based distribution markets. Patrick Montliaud will head the Integration and Transmission Solutions profit center that will provide end-to-end systems and design and support services for DVB-T and DVB-H broadcasters.

The changes are structured to improve responsiveness between Grass Valley management and its customers. Therefore, management team members were selected to take direct responsibility for sales organizations within their respective locations: Jeff Rosica in North America, who heads up an expanded global Grass Valley Marketing and Technology organization; Yamada in Japan, and Montliaud for Europe and the rest of the world. Olivier Lafaye will coordinate key account management in Asia-Pacific.

Rainer Sturm will be responsible for enhancing processes and quality support across the Grass Valley organization.

"The product development and sales structures we're putting into place will better support customers in their adoption of our leading-edge content creation and delivery systems," said Marc Valentin, president of the Grass Valley business. "We are ensuring a direct line between our senior management team and our customers, better proximity between our sales teams and our customers on the local level, and accelerating delivery of the solutions these media leaders and video professionals are demanding."